Musings from Jim Sorenson and a few guest bloggers about Transformers, character models, science-fiction, comic books, and whatever else is on our minds.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

The Ark Addendum - Autobot City concept art

It's Tuesday, and we all know what that means. It's time for another edition of The Ark Addendum. It's a special, double-wide spread of an issue today - the concept art for Autobot City.

Over the weekend, I got a request from a fan named Alex who was asking about artwork for Autobot city. Sadly, aside from a single, low-quality image that Floro Dery posted to his website years ago, I didn't have anything from the final version. However, I have stumbled across this absolutely lovely image of an early, unused concept for the city. The concept artwork is a Floro Dery hand-drawn original, on several oversized pieces of paper taped together. In fact, the center piece of paper were oriented vertically, hence the slightly odd shape to the image. It's an amazing piece, showcasing the extraordinary talent of the man who drew it.

Note that since the image was drawn across several pieces of paper, there are occasional discontinuities. These were present in the original drawing, so I resisted the urge to clean them up. If there's interest, I may post some additional views of this absolutely massive piece where I zoom in close up, so that you can read the hand-written notes on the city. Let me know if that's of interest.

For those of you printing out and saving these Ark Addendums, this is designed to be printed on two 8.5x11 pieces of paper as a two-page spread. Hope you enjoy! (A big thank-you to Dell Barras for saving this piece all these years, and sharing it with me.)